


In for the penny

by cryogenia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Canon Disabled Character, Chubby Kink, Chubby Stucky Exchange, Explicit Sexual Content, Fluff, M/M, Stuffing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 07:21:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4426445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryogenia/pseuds/cryogenia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People used to say that when they made the Rogers kid, they broke the mold. They weren't kidding. Tiny Steve Rogers is allergic to everything under the sun, which makes it hard to take him anywhere. When Bucky discovers the perfect place for them to beat the summer heat, they both wind up getting a lot more than they bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the 2014 chubby Stucky exchange, a kink trade for fans into weight gain/stuffing/feedism. This also happens to be the very first thing I wrote for this fandom. Go figure?
> 
> Complete explanation of potentially triggering content in the comments at the end:

Left to his own devices, Steve Rogers would ban the city from having summer at two in the afternoon. Maybe make summer illegal in general. His jenky back does better with warmth, but everything else suffers - his heart, his breathing, his sleep. Right now is the kind of heat that peels paint, when the toilet seat is eerily blood temperature to the touch.

It makes Buck absolutely frantic to convince him there’s a good reason they’re outside right now, walking eight blocks from their marginally adequate window A/C. 

“You’ll like this place, I swear,” Bucky tells him for what has to be the thousandth time. He slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders so roughly they nearly veer into an open cellar, because Bucky is incapable of having a conversation with someone without mauling them. 

“Too hot, Buck,” Steve mutters, but gives him a kiss before he shoves Bucky away. Bucky’s always taking him to little places he ‘just found’, like his commute just magically takes him six blocks in the opposite direction. Steve’s trying to grin and bear it. He’s glad Bucky’s got more spare cash these days. Just wonders if it’s any better that Buck is spending it all on Steve now, instead of just his little sisters.

Buck’s latest discovery turns out to be an ice cream shop little more than a glorified kiosk cut into the southwest corner of the Wedg-wood building, right next to where the CVS used to be and directly above the basement-level German restaurant where nobody goes. He’s surprised he hasn’t noticed it before. Everyone knows the Wedg-wood, pronounced wedge-wood. Legend has it they used to spell the name out proper in big block letters, till a wind storm came through and dropped the ‘E’ on some poor bastard’s head. Superstition made them leave out the offending letter ever since. Steve always thought it was a poorly disguised attempt to conceal the obvious truth: some people can’t spell worth a D-A-M-M.

“Ice cream, Buck? Really?”

“ _Vegan_ ice cream,” Bucky grins. “No cow’s milk allowed.” 

He spreads his arms out like he’s just brought down the stone tablets on nondairy himself and is ready to preach to the nonbelievers. 

“And no almond milk, or soy. They use coconut and rice milk - and they keep the whole place gluten free! I think.”

Okay, well. Shit. Steve braces himself to be tentatively impressed.

“Defcon: cautiously optimistic,” he admits, peering through the window. The inside’s nothing fancy - a single giant freezer that takes up the whole span of the back wall, 

“The chick who works here is pretty cool,” Bucky says. “We’re sorta friends.”

“Sorta friends?” Steve smirks. He can’t resist needling Buck on that one. Bucky has a functional understanding of human relationships; he just constantly feels the need to invent new categories anyway.

“Lemme guess, you almost-dated?”

“No,” Bucky snorts. “Just been by a few times on the way home. She’s sorta almost-always here, and you are sorta-definitely a pop punk disaster.” 

Bucky gets the door for him anyway, ever willing to be mistaken for a perfect gentleman. He mock bows to usher Steve into the tiny space and - okay, wow. Two surprises. 

First, while the freezer certainly implies they sell ice cream, nothing else about the shop is remotely refreshing. A wall of heat closes in on Steve the second he steps across the threshold, buffeted outward from the exhaust vents on the freezer. It’s almost as hot inside as it is out. Second, amidst highly saturated wallpaper with cheerful illustrations of stylized vector art strawberries, someone has tacked up a bunch of death metal posters. 

And the sound - Steve claws at at his hearing aid, because someone is playing the loudest System of a Down cover Steve has ever heard while simultaneously blaring a German-language movie on the world’s most dilapidated old school TV.

“Hey!”

Steve watches Bucky’s lips curve around the syllables of what has to be the name of ‘the chick who works here’, though from where Steve stands, the place is deserted. 

“You mind turning it down? My buddy here got some hearing issues.”

“It’s okay?” Steve tells him, at hopefully an appropriate volume. “I can switch it to directional.” If he can find the damned switch. Someday, he’s going to save up for an automatic. When he gets a better job, and pigs fly.

It doesn’t matter because just as he finds the toggle to change the mic mode, the background roar thankfully, mercifully dims. A dark-haired woman pops out from an alcove Steve hadn’t noticed before, lost in the visual chaos of a back line brimming with blenders, topping containers, and what appears to be an ancient espresso machine. 

Bucky’s ‘sorta-friend’ is harder to read than Bucky, but social convention confirms she’s saying hello. She’s got a sweet face with wicked, kiss-me lips, and a pair of hipster glasses out of tune with the futurepop she was blaring. She also seems utterly unphased by the heat. Improbably, she’s wearing a little knit cap.

Bucky notices Steve zeroing in on her mouth and jerks his head at the TV in the corner.

“The TV?” he asks, as much to Steve as to as to the server. 

“Would help,” Steve agrees.

‘Sorta-friend’ shrugs and reaches behind the shop’s only cash register to pull out a remote as big as her head. She taps a few buttons and the movie continues bleating on in subtitles, something about a son and his mother in a hospital. Steve’s eyes slide quickly away from the screen. 

“Yo,” the woman says, like they just walked into her living room. She gives Bucky a friendly enough up-down. Steve would bet good money their actual status is ‘would-have-dated, thinks-he’s-gay’. (Heaven help him, sometimes he’s almost grateful for bi/pan invisibility.)

“How you been, man?”

“Yo,” Bucky grins. “Pretty good, pretty good.”

He slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders and gives his whole body another affectionate shake. “Brought you fresh meat today. This is my - Steve.”

Bucky bites down on his plush lower lip as he gives Steve another friendly thrashing. Steve hip checks him right back, but he doesn’t worm out from under Buck’s arm. ‘My Steve’. They could know each other ten thousand years and he will still never get tired of that, the effect he has on his partner. Bucky’s normally so good with words, small-talking, flirting; Buck’s momma says he was born so slick he slid right out. Yet when it comes to the two of them, Buck just gets so flustered - then embarrassed, then embarrassed that he’s embarrassed.

Steve can see it in his face now, that he’s kicking himself for not thinking of ‘boyfriend’. Steve wants so badly to press his hand to Bucky’s cheek, feel out if he’s blushing.

“‘Fresh meat’? We’re in a vegan place, Buck,” he says. Dumb as it is, teasing helps sometimes. Teasing’s normal; they’ve been giving each other shit since long before they started sleeping together, and Steve is not about to stop now.

Sorta-friend shrugs. 

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I just do this for cash? I’m not allergic to the word ‘steak’ or whatever.”

“Unlike you,” Bucky says, and the twinkle is back in the corner of his eye. That’s another thing they have that most people don’t. Most people are horrified that Bucky takes the mick out of his disabilities. Steve’s not really sure why. He’s lived with this bull for long enough that at some point, he either has to laugh or cry.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “I’d go veg if I could but -- medical issues. Like I’m actually allergic to almonds. And soy. And maybe dairy and gluten, now.”

“You’re allergic to half the planet,” Bucky mutters. 

Steve gives him a good-natured kick. 

“Well, everything in here’s labeled?” Sorta-friend says. “And if you need me to get totally new scoops, I can. Everything has its own scoop already, but engh, cross contamination.”

“I told you they were good here,” Bucky says. 

“Yeah. Jane -- my friend who started this? -- is crazy allergic,” the server agrees. “She so much as looks at a tree nut and BOOM.” She puffs her cheeks out like a fish. 

The server moves away from the register and Steve notices for the first time there’s a menu chalkboard hanging on the wall behind her. He privately amends her name to ‘Darcy’, same as it’s written in the neatly-lettered section that says ‘Your Scoop Warrior Today Is…’

And like hell is he letting _that_ one go.

“Are you seriously called ‘scoop warriors’?”

“Yeah,” Darcy says. “Pretty badass, right?”

“I’d say it’s just plain bad.” 

Bucky sniggers and offers a fist bump. 

“Hey, watch it,” Darcy retorts. “Sounds like somebody don’t want free samples.”

She rattles a tall cup filled with popsicle sticks menacingly in Steve’s direction. There’s a barely recognizable caricature of a bald guy drawn on the side, right above the word ‘K-L-E-E-N’. There is definitely something about the Wedg-wood building and spelling. 

Bucky nudges Steve. 

“They let you try as many as you want here.” _So we can bail if you think it’s sucks_ , Steve translates in his head. Bucky-speak is subtle, but not hard once you’ve got the hang of it. 

“If you’re not being a dick,” Darcy says, amicably enough. “Just let me know. I can get you whatever.”

Steve goes up on his toes to get a better look down inside the case. It’s filled with a double row of white buckets, each set into distinct, collared slot. Laminated placecards are pasted in front of each one, listing a comfortingly short string of ingredients. 

“You use sucralose?” 

“Negatory,” Darcy chirps. “All-natural.”

“Cyanide’s all natural.” 

“Well, when we start using cyanide, you’ll get the first sample,” Darcy says in the best deadpan snark Steve has ever heard, and that’s up next to Bucky. 

“I like her,” he snickers. “She can stay.”

He turns his attention back to the case. Much as he’d legitimately like to hang out with Darcy, the heat is starting to get to his head. Better if they make a decision fast and get back outside, where it’s still hot as Satan’s armpit but at least there’s a chance of catching a breeze. He walks on his tip toes from one end to the other, checking for anything that might be on the No list. Some of the vats are so saturated he’s suspicious on principle - just because it’s ‘natural coloring’ doesn’t mean he’s not allergic to a dye - but the paler ones so far seem like safe bets. 

The names, on the other hand…

“‘Loot Froops’?”

“Uh-huh. Tastes exactly like a certain cereal who-must-not-be-named.”

“Copyright,” Bucky makes a noise that conveys exactly what he thinks about that. “Try it, Stevie, it seriously does.”

“Think I’ll pass,” Steve says absently. Even before his most recent gastrointestinal meltdown, his immune system has never tolerated lots of carbs. He thinks he might have last had Fruit Loops when he puked them on a kid at summer camp. One of the many awesome reasons his clothes had wound up thrown down a latrine.

He scans past a pastel blue cherry-carob chip to a dark, creamy looking bucket with tantalizing hunks of cookie.

“Espresso - cookie dough?”

“Gluten free,” Darcy assures him. “We make it in house.”

Steve can’t suppress the sigh that escapes him. One of the hardest things about giving up cow’s milk for this stupid immuno diet was definitely, definitely ice cream ‘with bits in’. When he was a kid, that was his mother’s one great indulgence - a pint of Ben and Jerry’s on payday. They’d sit there together at their tiny little table, and she’d let him pick out each tiny bit of brownie. 

“Oh fuck me,” he groans, and reaches behind to swat away Bucky’s hand before Buck can grab his ass in response.

Bucky pretends like he wasn’t just caught out and leans forward forward too, scrutinizing the ingredient card himself.

“Why ‘Mew-Mew’?” Bucky asks, pointing out the name. 

Darcy’s entire face scrunches up. 

“It’s actually spelled like - Mm-joll-near? I can’t pronounce it so, Mew-Mew.”

“Well, thank god,” Steve deadpans. “I’m allergic to cats too.”

“Cats sound better than ‘banana-avocado’,” Bucky offers. He points at a vat of what has to be the most unappetizing whorl of green-brown Steve has ever seen. Judging by the look on Bucky’s face, it’s just as bad without the color blindness.

“Hey!” Darcy growls. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“We have,” Steve says. He holds his hands up in apology. “I’m sure it’s good, it’s just hard to hide the actual - you know, avocado.”

He shares a suppressed shudder with Bucky. The month he’d been on a hardcore FODMAP diet had nearly killed them both.

“That’s cause the trick is, you don’t,” Darcy insists. She digs into the KLEEN cup and dives down into the case with a stick in each hand. She’s so short, she almost looks like she’s going to fall in.

“Here.” She comes up with a tuft of green on each stick. “Seriously. You have to try. Unless you’re allergic to bananas too?”

“Nah, hit me up.”

Steve catches Bucky’s eye and he knows that famous shit-eating grin.

“What doesn’t kill me…”

“...will probably just give you hives,” Bucky completes. They try not to laugh too hard at Darcy’s expression, but fuck - if he doesn’t get to joke about his disability, who does?

He tugs the stick out of her hand and inspects the green fluff, taps it experimentally with his lip - though it’s not like that tells him much. His stupid immune system may suck, but at least he doesn’t have any true anaphylactic reactions. Unless he can taste something he’s not supposed to (like almond) he’ll have to eat several bites to figure out if a new thing’s going to set him off, and by then it’s too late. 

On the plus side (if there is a plus), he’s eminently used to it. His allergies alone aren’t going to bury him, just earn him several hours of internal misery, which is so common at this point that he’s past stressing about it. Bucky gets more upset than he does, which is honestly sometimes more taxing than the attack itself. Like that one time they’d ordered delivery from Rotolo’s, and the crust had not been gluten free as advertised, and Bucky had sworn up and down he’d never go there again. Even though it’s his favorite. Even if it was an honest mistake. Bucky’s healthy as a horse and it’s touching he would go without, but sometimes he doesn’t fucking listen when Steve tells him that, job one: you want to avoid being ableist, you start listening to the disabled.

Steve takes a full-on, savage lick of the ice cream, trying not to get himself worked up over his own typical bullshit. Because Bucky does listen, the majority of the time; his lover’s got his back in ways most people never know. He lets Steve pick his own battles, and he backs Steve up when he’s in over his head, and the rest of the time he’s just there, like a shadow, cleaning up the little problems before they become big ones. Bucky tries so hard to find him things he can still enjoy, and --

Huh.

_Huh._

“It’s...good.” Steve blinks at the melting hunk of fluff. He half expects he hallucinated it. Not that he doesn’t like avocado as much as the next chronically ill guy, but honestly, he’s used to them being a slimey chore. Nothing like the sweet, simple refreshment that turned out to be.

Bucky is still staring at his own sample like he expects it might bite.

“This is nothing like that crap we made,” Steve tells him.

“Ooh, thanks for that glowing endorsement,” Darcy drolls.

“No, I mean - Buck, you gotta try this.”

Steve gives the stick another experimental lick, letting the cool cream wash over his tongue. There’s a definite undertone of banana, but the texture is what gets him. “Lush” doesn’t begin to do it justice. It’s so silky it tastes like Bucky’s velvet jackets feel.

He looks up and Bucky is staring at him, his own lips parted like he wants to catch Steve’s between them. Steve wonders if he made a noise.

Bucky is still watching, panting in a way that has nothing to do with the heat. Someone else might miss it, but he knows Bucky like an extension of his own body, and he knows what it means when Bucky’s shoulders tremble. When his eyes slip everywhere but inevitably land on Steve.

He looks back at the sample stick again, how it’s long and slender and wet at the tip, and oh, he gets it now. And hell yes, that’s too much fun to ignore.

“Try it,” he says again, this time with his hips cocked forward. He knows if Bucky weren’t caught off balance he’d be giving him shit for being a tease, but no one ever accused him of being an angel. Steve takes his time sliding the stick all the way into his mouth, tracing his tongue along the underside in a fashion that Bucky should be v-e-r-y familiar with. “Mm, I think you’ll like it.”

Bucky shoves his own sample stick entirely in his mouth like he’s plugging himself shut, and Steve grins because he’s knows damn well that’s what Bucky is trying to do. 

Steve draws off the stick in a long, slow, pop. He glances down in the case for the first thing that’s white.

“I’d like to try the horchata, too,” he says to Darcy, all sweetness and light. 

She snorts and digs into the KLEEN cup.

“There’s a quarter surcharge for teasing your boyfriend,” she says, but she hands the sample over anyway.

He wants to be embarrassed that even the ‘scoop warrior’ picked up on his dumbass attempt at flirting, but it’s really hard to care. Darcy seems amused, and Bucky’s ears are so flushed that even Steve can tell the tint’s changed. They must be positively on fire. He wants to curl his fingers around them and drag Buck down for a kiss.

Bucky bites down on his lip and splays himself against the case in what Steve knows is a desperate attempt to act like he’s not bothered.

“He’s got a _sweet_ mouth, what can I say?” he drawls. His voice is so buttery he almost makes the innuendo seem charming. 

Steve rolls his eyes; like hell he’s going to let Buck off that easy.

“I do, don’t I?” He plucks the second sample right out of Darcy’s hand and curls his tongue around the very tip, lets Bucky get a good, long look at that cream on his tongue. The horchata is even better, which is a minor miracle. It’s as smooth as the avocado, but the sweetness is just like real ice cream. He doesn’t have to exaggerate the sigh as it melts on down his throat. 

Bucky’s eyes are lidded and smoldering.

“You’re a menace,” he complains, but Steve knows that rasp. It means he’s about three seconds from being shoved up against this freezer. 

“What?” Steve turns so only Bucky can see him draw a white pattern all over his tongue, drag the stick out slow. 

_Holy fuck quit it_ , Bucky mouths at him. 

_Make me_ , Steve mouths back. His heart is thundering in his ears and he kisses the very tip of the popsicle stick, desperate for the way that Bucky leans toward him. He knows Bucky claims that he finds Steve attractive; Steve likes it best when Buck puts his money where his mouth is. He rarely feels this powerful outside of the internet, and he will milk it for everything his small body’s worth.

Something cool trickles down his wrist, and he looks down to realize a tiny rivulet is escaping. And because Steve can’t resist being a complete bastard, he bends his mouth to meet his wrist and laves up the splash with as much suction as possible.

Bucky’s clever mouth draws apart and then snaps shut without him saying anything, absolutely speechless.

“We’ll take a scoop of each,” Steve calls across the counter. “To go.”


	2. Chapter 2

The ice cream shop is getting to be a problem.

At first, Steve didn’t think anything of it. The heat continues to be relentless and it’s just so nice to have something cool in the evenings when their shitty window unit can’t keep up. They go for a scoop or three to cool off before they have to try and sleep. Then his manager switches up the schedule at the copy shop and he starts having to take the earlier train home from work, which is theoretically awesome except that it gets him in right smack in the hottest part of the day. And since he doesn’t get a lunch at work (because Phil’s an ass and keeps scheduling him seven-thirty blocks), it’s just as easy to swing by Midgard and have ice cream for lunch too. And then Bucky discovers that they’ve started selling take-homes too, so they wind up with a couple quarts of lemon-marshmallow in the freezer for game nights (which are most nights).

None of which would matter if Steve’s skinny jeans hadn’t suddenly got a whole lot skinnier.

"Hey, you drown in there?”

“Gimme a second!” Steve calls back from the bathroom.

From the clumping sounds and swearing, Bucky’s still digging through the bedroom closet. Probably looking for his own remaining pair of decent shorts. It’s not like Midgard hasn’t gotten to him too.

The difference is, Steve thinks glumly as he palms the curve of his blossoming belly, at least Buck has the decency to expand in more than one place. Bucky’s softness just makes the cuffs of his shirts a little tight where the extra fat layers over muscle, makes his ass even harder to ignore in jeans. Steve, on the other hand, continues to draw last at the genetic lottery. Scrawny little chicken legs, puny little bony arms - and all the fat square sitting squarely on his middle, in the start of what can only be described as a beer belly.

“You ready?”

Bucky appears like a second reflection behind him in the mirror. He’s managed to find a pair of cutoffs that button, though he still hasn’t fussed with a shirt. Steve sees the muscles ripple beneath the padding on Bucky’s pecs, and gives his own sorry excuse for a physique a wry grin.

“For a certain definition of ‘ready’.”

Steve gestures at the button-up shirt hanging open over his little gut, the khaki shorts digging a groove into his waist.  “You think they count this against ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’?”

“Mm,” Bucky’s arms slide around him from behind, nestling Steve right against him. His smile in the mirror is pure sex.  “If I were them, I’d let you ‘in’.”

Steve draws in a shaky breath. He can feel the cushion of Bucky’s chest against his back, heightened, in fact, by the thin fabric between them.  “That line is so weak,” he murmurs.

“Did it work, though?” Bucky waggles his eyebrows. Steve smacks Bucky’s fingers away from threading through his belt loops. It’s hard enough to tolerate the pressure without Buck also tugging at his waistband.

“Ugh, seriously, we need to stop with the ice cream,” he says. “This is my last pair of pants.”

“You know my feelings about you wearing pants.”

Bucky presses his face into the curve of Steve’s neck and draws the tips of his pointy canines down to meet Steve’s collar. A hot roil of blood rushes down Steve’s front, making his knees weak.

“I don’t need these pants to be any tighter, Buck,” Steve laughs, a little breathless.

“Yeah you do,” Bucky rasps. The flats of his palms sweep lower, beneath the hang of Steve’s belly, to seize at the inside of Steve’s thighs. Steve watches himself arch in the mirror as his hips rock forward on pure instinct, helpless to resist the impulse to rut when Bucky’s hands are so close.

“Keep that up, we’re gonna miss our reservation,” Steve sighs. Not that he’d mind, but Bucky would. Bucky has been a server (and a busboy, and a greeter, and a thousand other things). Bucky tells him all the time what it’s like when somebody cancels last-minute from your section. “Rude as fuck” is the politest term he’s ever used.

Bucky presses one last rough kiss to the crux of Steve’s shoulder and reluctantly unwinds.

“You look fine,” he says, as always somehow scarily in tune with what Steve is thinking. His reflected smile turns into a leer as he pulls away.  “Especially your ass.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve tells Bucky. “Go find a shirt. Unless you actually wanna be late.”

Which means Steve can’t put it off any longer, either. He does up the buttons to his own shirt - his last, theoretically decent shirt - and tries not to make a face. Whatever Bucky thinks about his posterior, there’s no way he can hide that his shirts are starting to protest. The pinstripes on this number are starting to develop a distinct curve as they proceed down, and the two buttons directly over his stomach are showing signs of strain. What did his figure studies prof call those?  “Drag lines”, Steve’s pretty sure.’The natural drape of a fabric when it’s pulled taut by movement’. Or by eating ice cream 24/7.

But...for all that he’s annoyed at having to budget for new clothes this month, nothing else has really come of it. It’s not like a few extra won’t help him the next time he inevitably winds up in the hospital; it might even level his blood pressure out. And Bucky has been. Well.

He turns around and Bucky is just standing there in one of his soft band shirts, staring through the doorway like the weak vanity lights have frozen him in place. The indent of his own teeth are swollen into his bottom lip.

“Like what you see?” Steve smirks.  

Bucky’s eyes slip away, guilty, to snap back to Steve’s face. Like Steve hasn’t noticed the way Bucky hangs around the bathroom, ready to scoop him up in a second if he comes out shirtless. Bucky’s hands are down his pants every chance he gets and the only downside is that for whatever reason, Bucky’s acting like he’s ashamed.

At least he slides up close, despite getting called out. Steve’s going to count that as progress. It goes against every fiber in his being not to swing at the elephant in the room, but for Bucky, he’ll put up with its shit a while longer. He knows that there’s reasons Buck hides himself sometimes, even over stupid stuff, even when it makes Steve’s soul ache.

He doesn’t hate many people the way he hates James Barnes Senior, but that is a flame that will never burn out.

Bucky curls a hand beneath his chin and tips him up into a forehead kiss. His famous smile is back, dazzling. It’s enough to ease the tightness in Steve’s chest, for now.

“I see you’re still a hot mess,” Bucky drawls. “Do you even own a shirt that doesn’t have paint on it?”

Bucky trails a finger down Steve’s chest, right to the apex of Steve’s little belly. Steve frowns. There’s a string of pale splotches dotted between the pinstripes, barely discernible from the white parts of the fabric. Which probably means they’re bright pink and stand out to the rest of the world.

“Oh hell, I think that’s ice cream.” Steve groans. “Must have spilled some earlier. Fuck.”

He knew he should have gotten off his ass and gone to the laundromat. It’s been so fucking hot though, they’re rinsing and recycling as many clothes as they can. He has no idea if cherry will even come out.

“You can borrow one of mine?”

Bucky says it like it’s no big thing, but Steve can read the hint of disappointment lurking in the downturned corners of his lips. Which is the opposite of how most people like it, if his Tumblr requests count as a representative sample. Half the commissions he’s got through his art blog lately have been for pinups of superheroes wearing their sidekicks’ costumes. But Bucky’s not a comics dude, and Steve could give two shits about what ‘most people’ like, anyway. Whatever Buck’s stupid hang ups might be, if this is something Steve can do for him, he will.

“Nah,” Steve says. “It’s already stained. Might as well wear it out to eat.”

The way Bucky’s entire body sighs tells Steve that was the right decision. And - so what if the buttons are pulling at his middle?  There’s only one guy he’s out to impress, and Bucky’s right here in front of him.

He is going to get to the bottom of the weird blushing virgin act, though. Bucky deserves to feel happy, and safe.

“Now are you ready, or are we gonna stand here looking pretty?” Steve asks with a grin.

“Yeah, I’m ready. C’mon,” Bucky claps a possessive hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Let’s go ruin that shirt the rest of the way.”

* * *

The newest place Bucky’s come across is a slightly larger hole-in-the-wall than usual, which is to say, it has actual seating. Still not many booths - almost nowhere in the city can cram in more than eight - but it looks like they were smart about their layout. The entire perimeter is lined with cocktail tables and high bar stools. There’s one set conspicuously empty in the corner, beneath an old-timey sign blaring the restaurant’s name in neon.

“Junk Food Vegan?” Steve reads incredulously.

“Uh-huh.”

“I can’t believe you found a real place called ‘Junk Food Vegan’.”

“At least they’re honest,” Bucky grins. “Sugar’s vegan.”

Steve resists the urge to kick Bucky in front of the host’s stand.

“Be nice.”

“You know me,” Bucky says. “I’m always nice. I love animals,” he tells the host with what to anyone else would appear to be an angelic, friendly smile.

Steve gives in to the urge to kick Bucky in front of the host’s stand.

“Do not say ‘with ketchup’,” he mutters under his breath.

“I wasn’t going to!” Bucky says, though the twinkle in his eye says otherwise. “You think it for me.”

Steve kicks his sneaker again and sort-of means it. One of the things he will never understand is how Bucky can be so defensive of Steve’s medical diet, and yet he can’t help taking potshots at vegan food.

Thankfully, the host is either oblivious or compensated well enough that she doesn’t give a shit about Bucky’s stupid jokes. She’s built like a miniature tank and plows them right to their assigned table. Their server is almost immediately on her heels, a sasquatch of a guy with flowing hair in flagrant violation of the local health code. He introduces himself as ‘Aaron’.

“Can I start you out with something to drink?  Special today is our blueberry lemon drop.”

“Just water,” Steve says reluctantly. His heart meds don’t get along with alcohol, much as he’d like to try something harder.

“Same,” Bucky says. Which is a sign, cause Friday was supposed to be payday, and he knows damn well Bucky prefers beer.

Steve waits until Aaron glides away to ask.     

“You see the girls today?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. He tugs at the paper wrapper around his silverware, tears out a random chunk. “You hear?  Becca got into that AI track she wanted.”

<i>So you bought her school supplies because your dad wouldn't</i>, Steve translates, but doesn’t say. Bucky gives him a tiny, grateful, half-smile.

“No, I haven’t been on Facebook,” Steve says. “What’s it about?”

“It sounds really cool. This whole year their classes are built around designing a video game. Like they get assigned to groups to plan it out, then they work together all year to actually write it. For their finals, they all trade off and have this giant LAN party.”

“That’s awesome.”

It genuinely is. Bucky’s baby sisters are both in a fancy magnet high school; the kind of place they couldn’t have even dreamed about when they were muddling through. Steve had been there once for Molly’s sophomore play. The auditorium had marble bathrooms and a full out professional light board.

“It’s really comprehensive - everything has a tie in. Like they take English class to work on their dialogue, and history to do research for their setting, the whole nine yards.”

“So how’s P.E. tie in?” Steve asks. “Dodgeball combat practice?”

“‘Evasive maneuvers’,” Bucky says. His smile is ticking up a notch. “Good for reflexes?”

“Don’t ask me. Spent most of it AFK,” Steve grins. He’d used to call physical education ‘figure drawing’, for as little time as he’d dressed out. Most days in the winters, he’d parked in the bleachers sketching the basketball players.

Aaron comes back with their drinks and to his chagrin Steve realizes neither of them have any clue what they’re going to order. He begs off another couple minutes so they can actually look at a menu.

“I don’t know what I want,” Bucky complains.

“You never do.”

But Steve’s pretty sure he does. Even if Buck doesn’t realize it himself.  

“What’re you getting?” Bucky asks, casual as can be, and Steve knows it’s not his imagination that his best friend’s voice has dropped.

Damn it, he knows Bucky likes watching him eat. Maybe even the messier the better. Ever since that first day at Midgard, he’s paid attention to where Bucky’s eyes go when he’s sucking on a spoon - and not once yet has he been disappointed. And now there Bucky is, drinking a water with the world’s smallest slice of lemon, trying desperately not to look like a puppy who wants to hide under the furniture.

The menu is a flat, laminated sheet that seems to double as a placemat. Steve gives it a cursory glance, then casually draws his finger over the “Shareables” section.  Let it never be said he’s not a shit starter.

“I’m thinking nachos,” he says, keeping Bucky in the corner of his eye. He doesn’t miss that Bucky’s breath catches.

“Yeah?” Bucky says.

“Yeah. The way I figure, nacho cheese isn’t real cheese anyway. The fake stuff will probably taste normal.”

“Okay. Shit - does that have seitan?”

“I bet they can leave it off.”  Steve makes a point of licking his lips.  “Man, I’ve missed nachos.”

Bucky leans perhaps a little too far into Steve’s personal space to inspect the menu himself.

“Would work better if you read your own,” Steve says.

“Would work better if you knew how to share,” Bucky retorts. Steve considers kissing him on his stupid pouty forehead.

Unfortunately, he’s a half inch from contact when Aaron turns up like a bad penny, expecting that they’ve finally got their act together. Bucky just smiles and bobs his head to the side graciously, covering up Steve’s aborted attempt at PDA. Steve flushes but manages to get through his order; Bucky picks out his own BBQ pulled ‘pork’. Steve wrinkles his nose when Bucky asks for it by name.

“No ‘Butts’ About It?  Who comes up with this stuff.”

“Hey, ‘Nacho Problem’,” Bucky ribs him. “I dunno, I thought it was like vegan law. Every place has to have cutesy nicknames.”

“They’re not all cute,” Steve smirks.

He points at a picture of what a reasonable person would identify as a lentil Sloppy Joe.

“Would you want ‘Sloppy Seconds’?”

Bucky nearly falls off the stool backwards, he’s laughing so hard.

They keep reading down the list a few more minutes, just to kill time. Bucky gets a lot of mileage out of the ‘tossed salads’ section (which has never made much sense to Steve, ‘down south margaritas’ is way better rimming slang). Steve lets him natter on though, watching the lush form of Bucky’s lips more than the shape of his words. 

He still doesn’t know how to broach the topic. Because it’s not like it’s weird, but it’s not exactly -- standard? -- either. A part of him still worries if he says anything, Bucky’s just going to deny it. Do that little half-shrug of his and let it roll off like water down a duck’s back.

When their server arrives with a truly prodigious plate of nachos, Steve figures he’s got his chance.

“Oh hell yes."

He makes an exaggerated show of dragging the plate to his side of the table even though it’s ridiculous. The nachos are clearly meant to be shared; it’s like someone dumped half a bag of chips on a plate and turned a hose of Teese on them. Steve also likes how they stuck in a teeny ‘pretend it’s healthy’ piece of lettuce on the side. If there are any actual vegetables involved, they’re impossible to identify.

“They weren’t kidding about junk food,” Bucky mutters. His gaze is fixed on the gleaming yellow mountain.

“Yeah.”  Steve plunges his fingers right into the middle of the pile, digging for a chip with as much of the gooey topping as possible. He comes up with one so loaded it cracks, spilling liquid cheese all over his fingers. 

“Mmph.”  He sucks the chip and his sticky fingers all the way into his mouth, wiggles a little as he slurps it down. The fake cheese is not half bad, but that’s not his main concern.

Bucky looks like his eyes might fall out of his head.

“You want some?” Steve asks, because he can’t resist the excuse to look Bucky straight in the face while he slowly licks the rest of his hand clean.

“I’m good,” Bucky says. He’s obviously not.

He takes his time with the next two and actually finds what might have once been an olive. He outlines it with his tongue, aware of Bucky following every minute motion. Bucky has always loved his tongue, begs him for it when he’s got his legs spread, and it is all Steve can do not to grin like an idiot. He presses the tip right through the olive’s pitted center and curls it up into his mouth. Bucky makes a wet noise halfway between a sigh and a growl.

Another slow lick from index finger to thumb and he knows what that has to look like. Bucky’s shifting constantly back and forth on his stool, like he can’t figure out which angle he wants to stare from. Steve picks the next chip with his whole hand, just scoops an entire fistful of cheese. He sticks his tongue into the tight curl of his fist and Buck’s lips pull back and nearly form words - but no, nothing. He snaps his jaw shut and presses his lips into a tight, unreadable line.

Well, Steve is a better tease than that.

He draws up an even bigger pool of cheese cupped in the center of his palm, forgoing the stupid chips entirely. A fat drop spills over the side of his hand and he makes an unsuccessful bid to catch it on his tongue. He glances down at the splatter on his shirt and then pointedly doesn’t do a thing about it.

Like clockwork, Bucky leans forward - leans back - gives up, and points.

“You got a--spot.”

Bucky’s lips are swollen with what has to be a brilliant flush. Steve can see where he’s been wetting them.

"Oh yeah?” Steve breathes.

He reaches down with his free hand and tugs the tight fabric away from his chest so he can suck the cheese out with his mouth. Bucky makes a noise like he’s dying, and this is it.

God, he’s got Bucky staring like he’s the most stunning thing on the planet and he doesn’t fucking care what Bucky’s issue is, he wants this. He wants to bottle this up for a rainy day and bask in it. But he can’t, not without saying something, he can’t just secretly take advantage of Bucky’s kink. Because for as much as Buck claims that he knows Steve better than Steve knows himself, anyone who really knows them has it the other way round.

Steve looks up at him from the handful of cheese he is lapping like a cat.

“Does this turn you on?” he whispers.

The reaction he gets is swift and immediate, but not exactly the one he was hoping for. Bucky’s entire body snaps like someone has turned a hose on him. He goes ramrod stiff. Defensive.

“What?!  Jesus Christ.”

“That’s not a no,” Steve huffs, and if that sounds pissy, well, whatever. He was expecting Bucky to resist, but he wasn’t expecting him to look so offended.

“Steve, what the hell.”

“Buck, it’s fine,” he breathes. “Who cares?”

He takes another, stubborn lap of cheese. Too hard - his tongue catches it wrong and sends half a chip flying onto his shirt. Which is also fine. Getting messier than he’d planned, but Buck likes it messy, doesn’t he?  In fact, why doesn’t he just dump the other half.

“Oops?” he says, and he’s shit at acting coy, but maybe he can pull off ‘believably uncoordinated and cute’.

He’s not prepared for Bucky to seize his hand and stuff a napkin in it -- or the thunderous scowl on his partner's face.

“You are <i>ruining</i> that shirt,” Bucky hisses.

“I thought you wanted me to.”

“Not for serious!  Nacho shit stains. You were just bitching about not having any clothes,” Bucky glowers, and - no. He is not making this all Steve’s problem.

“This shirt was already stained,” Steve growls. “Bucky, for fuck’s sake. What’s going on with you?”  

“Nothing!”

Which is a goddamn five year old thing to say.

“Come on, I’m not stupid,” Steve says. He can feel a vein in his jaw twitch. “ I see how you watch me, when I eat.”

“I’m not --”

“You are and you know it! I’m saying I don’t care!” Steve hisses.

“I care that we can’t talk about it, but apparently we’re doing this anyway. Unless there’s some other reason you drag me all over creation to every fucking restaurant in existence?”

When he was younger, he’d thought that shouting matches were the worst kind of fighting with Bucky. They’re not. It’s the moments when Bucky freezes, like if he holds very quiet and very still no one will see him. Bucky’s eyes are flitting everywhere, from the table, to the floor, to ceiling - everywhere there might be an exit. Everywhere except Steve’s face.

Steve feels something twist at the pit of his stomach that has nothing to do with the grease.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says roughly, and there’s something in his eyes that is so earnest. Desperate to be believed.  “I’m sorry. I swear to god, Steve, I’m not trying to be a creeper.”

“You’re not,” Steve stresses. “Hey. You’re not. I shouldn’t have snapped at you, okay?  You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do. I just want to be able to talk about it.”

Bucky pushes a hand through his hair like he’s trying to peel it off his head.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I don’t want you to say anything. Other than what <i>you</i> want.”

Buck slumps forward to lean on the table. Steve reaches out to brush his fingers over Bucky’s knuckles.

He thinks of that first month after they moved in together, how Bucky kept spending every last penny on the sisters he’d left behind. They’d had one air mattress and two stools from Target between them, and Bucky had still sent half his paycheck back to his mom. There are times when he fronts as the most spontaneous man in the world  -- Steeeeeve, let’s go out, let’s see a movie, it’s too hot, let’s get ice cream -- and then days where he believes just taking up space is unforgivable.

“It’s okay to want stuff, Buck,” he says softly. “Even if you think maybe it’ll freak me out?  I’d rather know.”

Bucky draws in one deep breath, then another.

“Like I said, I’m not trying to be a creep,” he admits. “I don’t take you out because I got some kind of -- agenda. You know that, right?  I just...fuck.”

Buck drags his hands over his face.

“You remember the last time you were in the hospital?  When you had that flare, and they didn’t fucking believe you?”

Which - as non sequiturs go, that’s impressive. Of course he remembers, there’s a lot of things he’d like to say about that jacked-up situation (‘pill seeking’, for Chrissakes, like he doesn’t have enough pills to keep track of already), but Buck’s going somewhere with this. He presses his lips into a hard, flat line and just nods.

“Well, I don’t know if you remember - you were kind of out of it - but that one prick tried to tell me he doesn’t think you have an immune problem at all? They were taking your blood pressure and he comes round with this bullshit about eating disorders.”

Something in his expression must have warned Bucky off because he corrects himself immediately.

“Not that eating disorders are bullshit!  But you know what I mean. You’re laying there in pain, and he’s trying to tell me your diagnosis isn’t real. And I was ready to take his head off when he tells me straight up, if you were any thinner, they were going to have to start feeding you Ensure.”

Steve can’t help but make a face.

“Yeah, I know, but worse - I mean, what if we hadn’t figured it out?  I know you got a good endo now but Christ. You got so goddamn skinny and I hadn’t even realized. So, I don’t know, I decided I should try paying attention, and once you got your diet sorted I wanted to take you out anyway, so I did, and that’s when I kind of --”

“Realized you liked it?” Steve finishes for him.

Bucky bites his lip and offers him the tiniest of nods.

“Yeah,” he says. His fingers jump beneath Steve’s palm, blazing with heat. Probably an embarrassed blush.

“I can’t explain it. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” Steve says. “What’s stupid is me not bringing it up sooner.”

Bucky snorts.

“Like it’s your job to be in charge of my fucked-up head.”

“Hey!”

Steve bonks him on the head with his knuckles, just hard enough to be noticeable.

“Somebody’s got to,” he says gently. “You’d forget it if it weren’t screwed on.”

That brings a tiny smile back to Buck’s face.

“Says the guy who loses his pencil like fifty times a day.”

“It’s not my fault you keep cleaning them to dumb places.”

Another thing that Bucky does, quietly, without asking. Steve will be the first to admit he’s not an amazing roommate - his psych prof once joked that he’s ‘anal explosive’, he walks into a room and his shit’s just everywhere - but Bucky keeps putting up with him anyway. He’ll bitch at Steve to clean up his art shit before it gets stomped on, but when Steve inevitably forgets, he’ll come back to find it piled neatly on the corner of their milk crate ‘coffee table’.

Bucky exists in the background so readily, silently taking care of the things that need to be done. Maybe it’s time somebody took care of him.

“I want to try it,” Steve says softly. “Some other time, where we both know what I’m doin’. And that I’m good with it. Okay?”

He watches Bucky suck in air until his shoulders tremble.

“Okay,” Bucky says roughly. “Okay. I’m cool.”

They sit there another few long moments in companionable silence, just drinking in each other’s company.

“So uh,” Bucky says finally, and there’s a glimmer of his usual mischief brewing in his eyes. “Since I guess someone has to say it.”

He inclines his head toward the neon plate between them.  “You gonna finish that?”

“Nah,” Steve grins. “Don’t tell the vegans, but I never missed junk food much anyway.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

They wind up taking the rest of the nachos - and Bucky’s fake BBQ - to go. Neither of them feels much like talking on the way home, but halfway up the subway steps, Bucky reaches back and takes Steve’s hand. Steve twines his fingers with Bucky’s and traces his thumb over Bucky’s pulse, steady and strong. Imagines his own erratic heart syncing to it. 

He doesn’t realize how much his routine has changed until they cross the street and Midgard is right there. They’ve gotten off a full stop early and he hadn’t even noticed. Bucky is still not quite looking at him, but there’s a ghost of a smile playing on his lips.

“Were you going to say something at any point?” he asks Buck, amused.

"Nah. I figured you’d buy a clue eventually.”

And they never do this on the street, but what the hell. He catches Bucky’s chin and goes up on his tiptoes to give him a good, solid kiss.

“Let’s go in.” 

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

The kiosk is as abandoned as usual, this time of night. Steve’s come here enough that he’s started to get a handle on their traffic patterns. The midday lull is followed by the rush hour rush, followed by the dinnertime doldrums. He wonders sometimes how they manage to get by, if the rushes really make up for all these hours of dead time. Probably having so few employees helps. For as often as they stop by, they’ve only seen maybe three different scoop warriors: Darcy, some random college guy, and on one extremely memorable occasion, a blond-headed Greek statue masquerading as a human being. 

The guy behind the counter today is a complete unknown, though. Generically tall, white, and incredibly nervous-looking, not even wearing an apron. Maybe new? The chalkboard reads “Your scoop warrior today is... INTERN." 

“Ah, hello?” the scoop warrior asks in a pleasantly unexpected English accent. He’s also remarkably audible. Maybe he hasn’t got the memo that Midgard believes in maxing out speakers - Nightwish is on in the background, but for once Steve isn’t getting flooded out.

“Hey man, what’s happening?” Bucky asks, and Steve can already see him turning up the charm to ‘talk the sun down from the sky’. Poor Intern looks like he’s ready to bolt. He’s got a hand around a scoop, but he’s wringing it like he intends to choke it to death. 

“Welcome to Midgard? Can I get you something?”

Everything comes out like a question, like the guy isn’t even sure he should be here. Steve figures the best thing to do is play it cool. Rule one of doing something new and different: act like you already know what you're doing.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Do you do any specials?”

“Uh…” ‘Intern’ twists to look at the menu behind him. “Well, there’s...smoothie-of-the-day?”

“I was thinking more like a challenge. Like those glass beer boots? ‘Chug the boot and your tab is on us’ sorta thing?”

Bucky’s hands seize on the case.

“Steve!”

“I’m serious,” Steve says, to both of them. “Like if I wanted the biggest banana split in here…”

“For Chrissakes…” 

“Look, I’m going to be honest with you,” the scoop warrior admits. “I don’t properly work here?”

“What,” Bucky says.

“Darcy, she’s part of our maths group, yeah? We’re working on this project, and she ah, had to pop out and make copies, so she asked me to watch the shop for a bit.”

Steve can’t help but share an amused look with Bucky. 

“She’s hard to resist, isn’t she?” Steve grins.

“Like a force of nature,” Intern nods.

Steve goes up on his very tiptoes so he can hook his chin over the edge of the case. Offers his very best all-American grin.

“Well, so am I. How bout we make this simple? Gimme a banana split - no carob sauce -”

He can feel Bucky watching him, shifting from foot to foot. His smile curves up like a shark’s.

“With a scoop of every single flavor that’s gluten free.”

“Okay? Ah…”

The scoop warrior looks down at the row of containers with something approaching alarm. “That’s...five, six - oh no…”

Bucky rolls his eyes.

“This is why I never tell you anything, you know,” he hisses.

“I know,” Steve says. He doesn’t exactly keep the smug out of his voice.

“You’re gonna kill yourself.”

Steve rolls his eyes right back. 

“I’m not a horse, Buck. I’ll stop before I explode.”

“Can no one explode while I’m in charge? Please?” The intern wields incredibly powerful doe-eyes, but Steve has practice fending off Bucky’s much more devastating pout.

“Just scoop damn the ice cream,” he tells the scoop warrior. 

He feels bad nearly the second the words leave his lips - even worse when the guy hops-to like a live wire’s smacked him on the ass. There are times Steve gets so ‘directional’ (in the words of his buzzword-loving boss) that he accidentally just starts ordering strangers around. Sometimes, for better or worse, they listen.

“Goddamnit Rogers, you are a menace,” Bucky laughs, because he knows all about Steve’s penchant for being the Boss of the Entire World. Steve smacks him on the hip. 

They shift to the register as the Intern shoves his head down in the case. Bucky edges right up against Steve’s side, bends down to press a quick kiss to his right ear.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he says, angled so only Steve can hear.

“I know.”

He reclaims Bucky’s hand, runs a finger over his scarred knuckles.

“I want to.”

And god, Bucky’s expression. The tension in him goes slack and Bucky’s whole body just blossoms, like Steve is this magical, rarefied thing. Like he can’t believe they share the same air. It’s completely over-the-top, and absolutely adorable.

“You know I’m down for anything,” Steve reminds him. He wants to be annoyed that Bucky still apparently thinks this is such a hardship, but it’s hard to give a shit. The intern is still head-first in the case, so Steve tugs on Bucky’s ears and pulls the ridiculous dope down for a kiss.

“Here we are!”

They jerk apart just as the intern resurfaces with a -- well. The ‘bowl’ he comes up with isn’t so much a bowl as a whole gallon plastic ice cream tub, incongruously labeled “SPRINKLES”. 

“Sorry,” the intern says. “I couldn’t find a big dish. It is clean.”

Bucky is stock still and staring, just staring, unusually silent. When Steve gets a better look, he sees why. There’s at least eight extremely liberal ‘scoops’ of ice cream there, and at least two very fat bananas peeking out the end. The entire thing is drenched in marshmallow sauce, like the intern is making up for the lack of hot fudge in sheer surface area. A lopsided boulder of coconut whipped creme reigns at the top, sagging beneath the weight of the juiciest maraschino cherry ever made.

It looks like a glacier.

It looks like it’s melting.

It looks like Bucky is about to come in his pants.

“That’ll be…” the intern mutters to the POS. He flips back and forth several times between the menu and the cash register, clearly trying to figure out what to ring. 

“It’s sort of a split, plus an extra bowl? Two bowls? You know what - forget it. I’m just charging you the split. If she wanted it done right, she wouldn’t have left me to do it, yeah?”

“Sweet! Thanks!” 

Bucky reaches into his back pocket and tosses his card across the counter before Steve can protest. Steve supposes it’s fair, though. Most of the time they scuffle over bills, but this is as much for Bucky as for Steve.

Besides, he’s got the suspicion he’s going to have to hit Goodwill for new clothes sooner rather than later.

“We should at least leave him a good tip,” Steve says very pointedly. He does feel bad about getting this guy in trouble. Assuming anyone will even notice; it’s not like Darcy can exactly inventory individual missing scoops. 

“It’s cool, I got you covered,” Bucky tells the intern, who is on his fourth attempt to get Bucky’s card to go through the reader.

Steve draws the bucket into the crook of his arm and heads for the sole table wedged up near the door. It’s a recent addition, and he’s still not sure he really sees the point. A single rickety table and two chairs is kind of pointless; Midgard might as well save the space for the line during a rush. Still, it’s welcome enough right now. He’s all for giving Buck’s new kink a shot, but maybe not so excited about dragging an entire bucket of melting ice cream home without a lid. And the store has fixed their A/C problem, at least enough to be tolerable. The freezer’s blower still puts out an obnoxiously constant stream of heat, but they’ve done something with fans and deflectors to where it evens out. It’s worlds better than their south-facing apartment, which is all he cares about.

Bucky casts a frantic look back over his shoulder, like he’s afraid Steve’s going to start without him. Steve unwraps his plastic spoon and waves back, because he enjoys being a little shit. 

After a few more minutes wrestling with the POS printer, Bucky is finally on his way over with a receipt. The intern disappears into the employee alcove with what looks like Bucky’s high school copy of _Differential Equations_.

“Hey, he’s got your old diff eq book,” Steve points out as Bucky drops into the empty seat. 

Bucky cranes his neck to peer over the counter, but the intern is already out of sight.

“Didn’t notice,” Bucky says. He leans forward on his elbows, bats his eyes in his very best dopey-on-purpose impression.

“I didn’t do so good in math. Was a little distracted by the hot guy in front of me.”

Bucky rubs his foot against Steve’s ankle. Steve snorts. 

“Bullshit, I was never in your math class.” Or his physics classes, or any of the other AP sciences. Bucky likes to pass off like he was some dumb jock, but he would fit right in at any college on the planet. If they ever come up with a way to pay for it.

“Who says it was you?” Bucky says innocently. “Maybe I liked staring at the back of Gabe’s head.”

Steve responds by picking up the maraschino cherry. He can’t not do something with this; it would be against pun-law.

“Maybe you’re saying you don’t want my ‘cherry’?” he grins, and pops it into his mouth.

“Fuck you, that was terrible,” Bucky says, but he looks distracted. Steve drags the tip of his spoon through the river of marshmallow and Bucky traces its progress with laser precision.

“This really turns you on?” 

Bucky draws in a sharp breath, but after a moment, reluctantly nods. 

“...yeah.” His voice is deep and rough, the way it is when he wakes up horny.

Steve digs up a fat spoonful of marshmallow and black cherry ice cream. He holds Bucky’s gaze as he polishes it clean.

“Like this?”

He keeps his voice low and steady, not that the intern is paying attention. The music has switched from Night Wish to something more industrial. Steve thinks he hears the intern singing along, which must mean it’s pretty obliviously loud.

Bucky bites his bottom lip and glances down, then up, then straight back at Steve, which is reassuring. ‘Endearingly bashful’ isn’t a look Bucky wears often; ‘overconfident and cocky’ is more his speed. 

“It’s not...any particular way,” Bucky admits. 

“Oh really?” 

Steve catches an entire spoonful of white marshmallow on purpose, the better to paint all over his tongue. Bucky’s squirming in his chair again. 

“Yeah, yeah, like of course I love your tongue. Fuck, Steve. You’re killing me.”

“Smallest scorpions, always most deadly,” Steve agrees. He has no idea if that’s actually true. He’s never bothered to Google it; he kind of doesn’t want to be proved wrong.

Bucky doesn’t even bother to check if the intern is watching (he’s not; Steve can see the counter). He reaches across to trail his fingers over Steve’s cheek. They come away with a smear of white.

“It’s kind of...everything,” Bucky rasps.

Bucky’s eyes flick down to the strained buttons on Steve’s shirt and Steve has never seen Bucky stare like that, like he might actually be drooling.

“I don’t know why. It’s just _hot_. Fuck. Am I fucked up?” 

Bucky tips back on his chair’s hind legs, tugging at his hair. Steve grabs for his elbow, not because he’s worried about Buck’s balance. He loves his stupid, stubborn best friend too much to let him hate on himself.

“No. No, Buck, it’s okay. Look,” he leans in closer, because he’s never sure of his own volume when he’s whispering. Better to err on the side of ‘too soft’.

“I told you. If it gets you hot, it gets you hot. Whatever. It’s just a little a fun.”

“That’s a hell of a lot more than a ‘little’.”

“And?” Steve grins. “Go big, or go home.”

“You’re impossible,” Bucky groans, but every line of his body screams ‘affection’, and he deigns to put his chair legs back on the ground. Steve takes another cautious spoonful of marshmallow, and is grateful to see he has Bucky’s undivided attention.

“I want this,” he says again, and draws up half a scoop of what maybe once was strawberry, with a hint of horchata on the outside edges. The flavors are starting to melt together, but that only makes it more interesting. Kind of like a beer tasting or something, ‘guess what notes that puddle has’. 

He wonders if Bucky realizes how wide he spreads his legs when he’s turned on in public.

The more he eats, the faster Bucky breathes, like they’re locked in a strange tandem race. It makes him want to speed up even more, though he’s struggling to keep steady as it is. He’s gotten used to inhaling his weight in ice cream, but the sauce is a new complication. Absinthe and coconut cream are not exactly a winning combination, and it feels like there’s a boulder’s worth to slog through. 

His waistband is also starting to dig into his middle, bad enough he finally has to pause. He reaches down to wiggle it lower.

Bucky’s eyes follow his fingers down, devouring him, and god, if that doesn’t get him hard.

“You okay?” Bucky mouths.

“Yeah,” Steve grunts. “I told you, I don’t need these any tighter.”

Bucky’s hips actually jerk at that. He grabs the edge of his seat and holds on for dear life, but this time he doesn’t attempt to make a joke or scoot away. 

Steve glances round the kiosk again - still empty, still devoid of a scoop warrior. He wants to ask Bucky if it turns him on just hearing Steve talk about outgrowing his clothes, but if the intern is right, Darcy should be on her way back at some point. The last thing Bucky needs is the world’s nosiest scoop warrior to walk in on them dirty talking.

Although, if no one _realizes_ he’s talking dirty…

“Might have to lose the button,” Steve says, easy as can be, and Bucky’s hand draws back between his legs. The heel of his palm is just inches from grinding down on the erection Steve knows Buck is hiding.

He powers through another scoop and a half, deep throating the spoon every chance he gets. He’s starting to be aware of an oppressive fullness from the top of his chest down along his treasure trail, but it’s not unpleasant. More like the good sort of sore, like the ache in his calves when he’s well enough to handle all the stairs at work. It helps to tilt his body forward too, he discovers after a little squirming around. He spreads his own legs to make room for his belly and angles his chest toward the table, and like that, the pressure eases into a diffuse warmth.

“Still cool?” Bucky asks, and he is so concerned and so turned on and so desperately sweet all at the same time that Steve wants to drag him across the table and make out with him for possibly ever.

“Golden,” Steve pants, and after a quick spot check for the intern, gives into the urge to sweep an exploratory hand down over the expanse of his own belly, fascinated by how much bigger it looks. 

Bucky inhales like he’s been kicked in the back. Steve flashes him a sticky grin and does it again, as much for his own pleasure as his lover’s. His little starter gut has ballooned into a tight bulge, swelling out from his puny chest to become his most prominent part. Academically, he’s aware he’s still not exactly a force to be reckoned with, but - damn. There’s never been so much of him before, and he feels -- expansive. Substantial. Ground in his tiny frame in a way that he rarely has before, and for the first time, maybe he can appreciate what Bucky was talking about, when he was remanded to the hospital. His body is warm lately, and silky soft, and against all odds, still keeping him going, and he feels so much better this way.

Bucky’s hand is backed up all the way into his crotch, and he is visibly trembling from the effort not to grind on it.

“Fuck, Steve you are murdering me,” Bucky mouths in little fits and starts. “Wanna take you home so bad. Jesus.”

“Gimme a second.”

The ice cream has long since become a struggle but he’s got so little left that he can’t not finish it. Not when he’s this high and riding on top of the world. He holds his own stomach as the next bites slide down and learns that following them with his fingers feels fucking amazing. Rubbing his front sets off a delicious ache through the cramping muscles and drums up the pleasurable glow. Another deep swill and he is almost done, almost.

“Steve - seriously - you don’t have to finish that.”

“I want to,” he gasps, and freezes.

The cut of his waistband is suddenly unbearable and he undoes his fly button with a quick and brutal yank. His swollen stomach surges forward and the relief leaves him so giddy he doesn’t stop to think. He claps the spoon right on the damned table and picks up the bucket with his own two hands so he can chug the melted remains.

Bucky’s quiet “oh my god” is the sweetest thing he’s ever heard, even sweeter than the ice cream.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time they limp home, Steve is starting to regret -- well, existing in general. He always regrets living on the third floor, but especially when he’s so front-heavy. Every step makes him feel like he’s going to slip and face plant on the stair, and if that happens it’s all over. He’s going to split right down the middle. He wedges his shoulder against the stairwell and leans on the banister all the way up to the first floor landing, where he has to pause and catch his breath.

Bucky starts rubbing slow, soothing circles at the base of his spine. Bucky’s had his hand on Steve’s back the entire way, letting Steve lean when he wants, taking some of the weight off when they were stopped at street corners. Probably half their building thinks Buck is walking him home drunk. He feels drunk. Everything is flushed and hazy, and a little like sprawling out naked in front of the couch.

“We can sit for a minute?” Bucky asks.

Steve groans. “If I set down, I’m never gonna move again.”

“Sure you will,” Bucky says. His hand doesn’t stop kneading comfort into Steve’s back, though his eyes hold a wicked spark. “I can roll you.”

Steve’s not so incapacitated he can’t reach back and pinch Buck’s chest.

“I will puke all over your stupid faux vintage shirt,” he says. Bucky likes to wear these ridiculous ‘pre-distressed’ band shirts that make his nipples targets. Steve catches one of them, tugs it for good measure.

“I’ll point you downhill,” Bucky grins.

At least he’s amused now. The first couple blocks, when it had really started to sink in that yes, he had eaten that much and yes, they still had another four blocks to go, Bucky had been so obnoxious Steve had barely kept him from grabbing a cab. And Steve’s had his days where he’ll give in and ride but no. He sets his size-five foot down at wasting money just because he’s too stupid to recognize when he’s being stupid.

They make it up two more flights one laborious step at a time. Steve’s stomach protests the entire way. He keeps his mouth solidly shut so he can’t give it away, but every time he shifts a certain way he can’t stop hiccuping. Lifting his legs compresses him just enough that his belly jostles, sending a radiant ache through his sides. By the time he slumps against their door, he’s sweating through his button-up.

Bucky reluctantly pulls his hand back so he can dig out his keys, though he looks anxious to let Steve stand by himself.

“Does it hurt bad?” he asks.

Steve spreads a hand out on his side, considering. It’s uncomfortable to be so bloated, but not intolerable. If anything, it’s almost nice to have a change of pace. It’s probably fucked up, but after the last few months discovering his new food sensitivities, he’s more accustomed to stabbing pains after dinner. Being able to eat so much that he’s a dopey wreck is honestly a treat.

“Not...really?" he groans. "I’m just _full_."

His last word dissolves into a high-pitched hiccup and his stomach jerks painfully. He sucks in as deep a breath as he can manage and holds it until his stupid diaphragm stops rebelling.

Bucky gets the lock and goes to turn on the window unit. Steve lurches into the bedroom, too full to do anything but make a beeline for bed. He works off his shoes by standing on one heel at a time and yanking his feet out. He can’t even conceive of bending down to touch his toes right now.

“Can I get you anything?” Bucky calls, in that particular tone that says he’s not taking no for an answer. He’s got his mother-hen plumage on full display.

“You can cut me out of these jeans?” Steve grins. He might as well tease while he has the opportunity. “No way in hell I’m fitting into these again.”

If Bucky says anything beyond a strangled squeak, it’s too low for him to pick up.

Steve peels the denim off as gingerly as he can, because he wasn’t entirely kidding. Maybe it’s his imagination, or maybe it’s his shit metabolism at work, because he could swear these pants have gotten tighter. It’s not just the stomach; they feel like they’ve been shrink wrapped to his legs.

Bucky glides up behind him but pulls just short of touching. He hovers anxiously, like Steve might rupture if he so much as breathes on him funny.

“Seriously, I’m fine,” Steve growls, and curses himself because damn it, he’d been trying to get Bucky to relax. So of course, first time out, he’d just had to go and eat himself stupid.

Bucky hasn’t left, though. Steve turns and there is that soft inhale, Bucky’s shoulders trembling before he’s ready to speak.

“Told you, you were gonna bust yourself,” Bucky says.

He wraps his arms around Steve in a facsimile of their usual hugs, but his arms don’t close all the way around. Not quite. He’s trying so hard to be careful. Steve wants to cuddle him up and never, ever let go.

“It helps if you rub it, I think,” he says quietly. He presses his forehead to Bucky’s collarbone.

Bucky’s fingers flare and seize against his back and then gently, oh so gently, slide around to Steve’s bloated sides.

“Like this?”

Steve groans. It’s different having someone else’s hands on him. Bucky’s fingers press into the taut ache at the sides of his belly and stroke down, drawing the soreness with them. It’s firm and steady, despite Bucky’s nervousness, and it’s starting to iron the ache back out into arousal.

“Seriously, it’s okay?”

“Better than ‘okay’,” Steve gasps. “You can go a little harder?  Maybe take my shirt off?”

“Have I told you lately I don’t fuckin’ deserve you?” Bucky rasps in his hearing ear.

Bucky pulls his shirt buttons open all the way down his front, pushes the halves of his shirt off his shoulders. His hands cup Steve’s meager excuse for pecs like they’re the most luscious things he’s ever seen, then slide down, down over the tight swell of his belly.

“Oh, fuck me,” Bucky moans. He sounds almost reverent.

“Might have to wait,” Steve says, breathless, though it’s true that the motion is waking dead soldiers. Bucky’s square palm sweeping below his belly button makes his cock leap.

“This might get in the way.”

He slaps the top of his own belly and watches Bucky’s eyes go black with lust. Bucky’s hands are everywhere, tracing out the firm, tear-drop shape of his new gut, up and down and around and around, like he’s memorizing every new inch of him. Steve leans into his touch harder, relishing that strange boundary between pressure and pleasure that leaves him seeing stars.

His eyes slide shut and when he opens them Buck’s sinking down to the floor, dragging his nails down Steve’s treasure trail.

“Can I suck you?  Wanna suck you,” Bucky begs, on his fucking knees, and Steve can feel his own go weak.

“I wanna lay down,” he gasps, because he will not survive this any other way. Bucky bites his swollen lips and pulls back long enough to let Steve escape.

Getting onto the bed is an unexpected challenge. He can’t bend in the middle and his stomach lurches dangerously when he tries to crawl up on all fours, so he has to settle for sitting down and sweeping his legs up one and a time. He has no sooner managed to lay back than Buck is climbing after him on his hands and knees.

“You are so fucking hot right now,” Bucky breathes.

On his back, the dome of his own belly is overwhelming. Steve clutches it just to confirm what he’s actually seeing, because holy shit. He’s never eaten so much that it’s hard to breathe before, and he kind of doubts he’s ever going to be able to sit up again.

Bucky yanks aside his wrists and presses a frantic, open-mouthed kiss right at the apex of his swollen gut.

“Fuck, Stevie…”

He watches in fascination as Bucky shoves his hand down his own pants like he hasn’t done since they were seventeen, too over stimulated to even unbutton them.

“You’re gonna have to do all the work,” Steve laughs. “I don’t think I can reach.”

“Nngh, I don’t care,” Bucky pants. “Let me take care of you.”

He keeps nibbling all over Steve’s gut, soft licks at first, then hard and long enough to leave hickies. Steve would normally protest but what the hell, who’s going to see them?  He groans even louder at the thought of carrying Bucky’s mouth with him to work, secretly branded beneath his stupid embroidered polo.

Another hiccup racks his middle, sending a twinge all the way down his legs.

“Ow,” Steve whines.

Bucky pulls his hand out from between his legs and starts rubbing soothing circles all over Steve’s lower belly. His palm is still sticky with precome. Steve bites back a whimper of arousal.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, like Steve’s diaphragm freaking out is somehow his fault. “Didn’t wanna make you sore.”

He buries his face against the side of Steve’s gut.

“Wanna make you feel so fucking good.”

“You make me feel good,” Steve moans back. “Buck, please.”

A pure line of heat ripples down his front as Bucky shifts to drag his tongue beneath the hang of Steve’s belly. His cheeks are so fucking warm, he must be flushed all the way to his toes. Steve can’t even see him over the swell of his own bloated stomach but he can feel the shape of Bucky’s smile pressed into his skin. Bucky’s teeth rake into his thin patch of pubic hair and Steve actually squeaks.

“Easy,” Bucky slurs, like he’s drunk on this too. Steve’s cock twitches and grazes what feels like Bucky’s chin, and fuck but he is too full to do anything but squirm.

“Oh my god,” he gasps. Bucky’s mouth moves lower and all the blood in his body is following with it, and suddenly the room is spinning. “Fuck, Bucky, please, please suck me.”

Bucky’s lips close over the head of his dick and Steve wails.

They’ve been together for years and there are still no words for what it’s like to have Bucky’s mouth on him, around him. Bucky gives head like he was born for it, and the best Steve can do is try to hang on. He instinctively grabs for Bucky’s head but it’s too hard to reach right now so he settles for rubbing his belly. Bucky makes a sound like he’s choked but before Steve can ask if he’s alright, Buck takes him deep, all the way to the root, until Steve’s pulse is roaring in his ears.

Distantly, he feels a rhythmic thrum out of sync with the pace of the suction. He cranes his head to the side and fuck. Bucky has his fly open and the front of his boxers down, jerking himself like it’s going out of style.

Oh god, what if Bucky wants to fuck him?  Steve whimpers and palms at his belly because he can’t, fuck, his legs are twitching on either side of Bucky’s ears and he couldn’t haul them up to save his life. His stomach is so heavy, weighing him down into the mattress and he can’t even roll over. The only thing he can do is lie back and take it, the way he never does.

Bucky swallows him all the way down again and heat roils down his front. Everything is drawing in toward his groin and Steve doesn’t recognize his own voice. He sobs and claws at his stomach because his fingers want so desperately to bury in Bucky’s hair, and he can feel Bucky whimper around him in response, and that’s what does it.

His legs seize up against Bucky’s face and he hair-triggers like he hasn’t since he was sixteen, howling something that might have started as Bucky’s name.

Bucky keeps on sucking, just drinks him until he’s dry, until he’s so wrung out and oversensitive he goddamn near cries. Then suddenly, mercifully, the overwhelming heat fades. Steve watches through a sea of white spots as Bucky shoves himself violently up onto his knees, fucking his own fist with sharp, vicious strokes. His cock is so swollen, it looks like it hurts.

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve whispers. “C’mere.”

He tries to reach up for him but his whole body’s still floating. His arms flop high and to the side, and Bucky makes a noise like a wine glass singing, high and breathless and ready to break.

“Yes, come on,” Steve breathes, and if he can’t get his arms around Buck, he’ll give him the next best thing. Sluggishly, he flops a hand up onto his own chest - and draws it slowly, carefully over the greatest curve of his belly.

“Come for me, come _on_ me,” he orders.

Bucky collapses forward onto one arm and Steve is just barely able to help catch him because he is coming and coming and coming.

\---

A few minutes and a few thousand apologies later, Bucky is running his second (dry) washcloth over Steve’s neck.

“Sorry,” he says again. He moves the cloth up to polish an ear.

“Buck…”

“I got it in your _eye_ ,” Bucky says. It’s still not clear from his lips if he’s awed or scandalized. Knowing Buck, it’s probably both.

“Pretty sure that’s to the left,” Steve says, tugging the cloth gently out from Bucky’s hand. His hearing aid is splash resistant; Bucky’s just fussing at this point.

“If you got it in my ears, I’d be pretty impressed. C’mon. Lay down, you’re giving me a headache.”

Bucky bites down on his lower lip, but finally deigns to settle. He nestles in along Steve’s side, close enough to touch, but not quite snuggling. In the other room, their ancient window unit keeps puttering away, struggling to damp down the ambient heat.

“You’re sure you’re good with this?” Bucky asks quietly. “You...want to do it again?”

Steve contemplates the ceiling, one hand on his stomach.

“Not all the time?  Would probably make me sick, if I did this a lot.”

Bucky snorts.

“Well, yeah, that goes without saying -”

“-but it was fun,” Steve finishes. “I liked it.”

He turns his head, gives Bucky a soft smile.

“I liked doing it for you.”

Bucky smiles back, soft and grateful. He doesn’t say anything, but he brushes a hand against the edge of Steve’s.

"You’re buying me new pants, though,” Steve tells him.

“Good. Can I get you some that don’t look like your Momma dressed you?”

“Hey, my mom had excellent taste in scrubs.”

Bucky’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Well, if you wanna wear Hello Kitty to work, I won’t stop you.”

Steve swats at Bucky’s hip and pinches him until he yowls. They slap at each other ineffectively for a couple minutes, laughing like loons.

“Seriously, it’s okay, though?” Bucky says. He slides a hand to squeeze at the pudge over Steve’s hips. “Might not be the only time you buy pants.”

And he’s tempted to say that he’d thought they’d just established, Bucky is buying the pants, but he knows what Buck is really asking. He nods instead, reaches out to take Bucky’s hand.

“Well, you know what they say,” he grins. “In for the penny, in for the ‘pounds’?”

Bucky groans and pretends to smother himself with his own pillow, and Steve laughs and laughs and laughs.

The A/C is as asthmatic as he is, his internal organs hate him, his job is going nowhere; but even if he had nothing else, he will always have Bucky. He will always have more than enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for overall fic (very minor - this is primarily a fluffy kink fic):  
> Brief discomfort about body size/shape (soothed by a partner), brief mentions of internalized ableism, minor references past bullying/less than idyllic childhood. Some internalized kink shaming (soothed by a partner). And obviously, feedism - a partner taking sexual pleasure in their lover gaining weight/overeating.


End file.
